People regularly use plants for a wide range of utilitarian, spiritual, pharmacological, and dietary purposes throughout the world. Scholarly understanding of the nature of these uses in prehistory is particularly limited by the poor preservation of plant resources in the archaeological record. In the last two decades, researchers in the South Pacific and in Central and South America have developed microscopic starch grain analysis, a technique for overcoming the limitations of poorly preserved plant material.

In Acorns and Bitter Roots, Timothy C. Messner establishes starch grain analysis in the temperate climates of eastern North America using the Delaware River Watershed as a case study for furthering scholarly understanding of the relationship between native people and their biophysical environment in the Woodland Period. Messner’s analysis is based on extensive reviews of the literature on early historic and prehistoric native plant use and the collation of all available archaeobotanical data, a review of which also guided the author in selecting contemporary botanical specimens to identify and in interpreting starch residues recovered from ancient plant-processing technologies. The evidence presented here sheds light on many local ecological and cultural developments as ancient people shifted their subsistence focus from estuarine to riverine settings. These archaeobotanical datasets, Messner argues, illuminate both the conscious and unintentional translocal movement of ideas and ecologies throughout the Eastern Woodlands.

Timothy C. Messner is a research collaborator in the Archaeobiology Program, Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of Natural History, Washington, DC, and a research associate with the Center for American Archaeology, Kampsville, Illinois.

“Messner compiles ethnographic information about the use and processing of food/medicinal plants from the Mid-Atlantic, and develops critically needed identification criteria for use in analyzing starch grains from those plants. It will be an invaluable reference and teaching tool, and should have a long shelf life as identification criteria are unlikely to change.”—C. Margaret Scarry, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

“This work is a fine contribution to the ethnobotanical and archaeological literature and will enhance and speed the application of starch grain analysis in eastern North America, a region that has lagged behind the rest of the New World in embracing this exciting approach.”—Deborah Pearsall, University of Missouri